Wang Ming

Wang Ming (23 May 1904-27 March 1974) was a key Communist Party of China leader during the Chinese Civil War of the 1930s and a rival of Mao Zedong.

Biography
Born in Anhui to a family of peasants, Wang Ming led student protests against Japanese products and corrupt elections and joined the Communist Party of China at the age of twenty. Wang later studied in Moscow and learned the Russian language, and he served as the CCP's head of propaganda before serving as a founding member of the "28 Bolsheviks", Marxist Chinese students who studied in Moscow. From November 1931 to November 1937, he represented the CCP in the Comintern, but he would return home to coordinate the war with Japan; he was instrumental in forming a united front against Japan with the Kuomintang. However, he was embarrassed by Mao Zedong's insistence that the communists not take part in the major battles of the war, leaving it to the Kuomintang to bear the brunt of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 led to his fall from grace, and Mao began a campaign against dogmatism and empiricism, the Yan'an Rectification Movement. His expulsion was a blow to the Soviet Union, which had hoped to control the future of the revolution in China, and he would die in Moscow in 1974.